I was not a fan of Views. That isn’t to say that I don’t like Drake: So Far Gone and Take Care are among my favourite albums, and I consider 2015’s If You’re Reading This, It’s Too Late one of his strongest projects. But with Views, his highest charting album to date, I found myself simply bored. And as long as he keeps cleaning up awards ceremonies like he did at the AMAs last night, Drake isn’t going to have any reason to try to make better music.

So many songs (“Keep the Family Close”, “U With Me?”, “Still Here”, “Fire & Desire”) were snoozefests, the ‘bangers’ (like “Hype” and “Childs Play”) fell flat, and the Future-assisted “Grammys” didn’t come close to the energy the two generated for their joint album What A Time To Be Alive. The soft songs contained none of the sincere vulnerability and songwriting abilities present on Take Care or Nothing Was the Same, and the energy that drove IYRTITL was totally absent from Views. “Controlla” and “Pop Style” both suffered after Drake removed the features; “Controlla” is so obviously a Popcaan ripoff that it’s even more of a crime to remove the Dancehall legend’s contribution, and Kanye’s verse on “Pop Style” worked far better than Drake’s frugal attempt at making the song entirely his own. “Faithful” became was vastly improved by dvsn’s remix of the track, and would’ve been even stronger if Southern legend Pimp C was used as anything other than a prop of Drake’s love of Texas. Even the songs I generally enjoyed (“Weston Road Flows”, “Redemption”, “Too Good”) didn’t compare to the rest of Drake’s discography.

A lot of this comes down to personal opinion, but I honestly believe that any one of Drake’s projects (after Thank Me Later) stand up so much stronger than Views. Despite this, however, the album has done impossibly well. It was the first album of the year to go double platinum (and the only one to go triple platinum), and “One Dance” is the most-streamed song in Spotify history with over a billion streams. Drake found a formula that seems to work, but after making relatively groundbreaking records that contributed to the changing trajectory of hip hop in the past few years, he seems content to allow his sound to stagnate.

Drake was nominated for 13 AMAs, breaking Michael Jackson’s 1984 record of 11 nominations. Drake took home the awards for favourite artist, album, and song (“Hotline Bling”) in the hip hop category, and shared Rihanna’s award for favourite R&B/soul song for their song “Work”. Granted, the AMAs three-nomination-per-category practise is incredibly unrepresentative, and the only artists nominated for hip hop were Drake, Future, Fetty Wap, and Desiigner. But last night followed a trend of Drake being rewarded simply because he’s Drake.

Maybe I’m simply biased because I didn’t enjoy the album, and maybe the fact that Drake was nominated for favourite artist in both the pop and hip hop categories speaks to the fact that his sound transcends typical boundaries in music, but I think it’s fairly clear that Drake doesn’t need to try anymore. He’s going to keep being rewarded because he’s going to keep being Drake, but I for one miss the days where he worked hard at his craft and made his own waves.